ActiveX: Microsoft's misfire

After more than a year of relentless hype and repositioning, Microsoft's (MSFT) ActiveX is standing still.

The term, once synonymous with the company's entire Internet campaign, is being relegated to the role of bit player--the victim of sloppy marketing, customer confusion, and aggressive tactics from Java-touting competitors. And, according to industry analysts and its own executives, Microsoft has only itself to blame.

The initiative's fate is a classic illustration of how quickly fortunes can rise and fall in the unforgiving business of high technology, even when its owner is the most powerful software company in the world. The plight of ActiveX has also served as a testament to the power of perception and how easily things can unravel when a company loses control over the image of its product.

"One of the things we have done poorly is the naming and renaming [of this technology], and we have confused people," said Tod Nielsen, Microsoft's general manager of platform marketing and developer relations. "We are trying to fix a problem we created, and it will take us some time to do it."

In a key step toward controlling that damage, Microsoft has anointed another technology to take the place of ActiveX, at least in the eyes of a skeptical marketplace. Now, the new buzz word is "COM," for Component Object Model, the company's Lego-like blueprint for linking pieces of software and a crucial part of the company's high-margin server packages. (See related story)

"It is a conscious decision by Microsoft to talk more about COM and less about ActiveX," said Gregory Leake, a lead product manager for the company's Visual Studio development tool package. "There has been a lot of confusion in the marketplace. ActiveX has been more tied to controls, while COM is the foundation for ActiveX. ActiveX got distorted, in a sense."

The industry is littered with evidence of a major initiative gone awry. Microsoft's plan to drive adoption of ActiveX through an industry consortium, the Open Group, is all but dead. An Open Group offshoot established in late 1996, the Active Group, also has been virtually abandoned

'Ac•tive•X n  First used to describe all of Microsoft's component technology for the Internet, it is now used to refer only to the controls built to work with the COM model. The company came up with the ActiveX name in 1996 for its slimmed-down, Internet-ready controls used in client-side software and browser applications.

by Microsoft, which has established internal divisions to handle COM marketing instead. That effort came under fire by competitors for not making more of the underlying Windows architecture open to developers.

Aside from industry support and market perception, Microsoft also faced disturbing issues that cut to the heart of the technology itself: ActiveX failed to take hold with developers building wide-scale commercial applications, analysts say, because of security concerns and slow download times for its controls. (See related story)

Microsoft executives are quick to point out that ActiveX controls will survive, at least in name, to describe Microsoft-specific COM components used mostly for internal business applications on corporate intranets.

With the release of Windows NT 5.0, Microsoft's flagship operating system, and a raft of COM-based server technologies coming later this year, the company is putting all of its marketing muscle behind COM, Nielsen said.

He admitted that ActiveX has not been well understood by developers to date. "Our intent is to simplify the messages we have presented to the developer community," Nielsen added. "Some made sense; some did not."

Microsoft christened ActiveX in 1996 as the name for slimmed-down, Internet-ready controls used in client-side software and in Web browser-based applications. ActiveX controls grew out of Microsoft's Visual Basic development tool, which uses portable software controls called Visual Basic Extensions, or VBXs. The company reworked an existing specification for OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) controls, which were designed to work with COM, and launched ActiveX controls for building Internet and intranet applications.